As I cast my mind back over my many years, I believe I can say with utmost sincerity that I have never faced anything quite as terrifying as being called on in any of my grade school classes to walk all the way up to the chalkboard to fill in the answer of whatever math or spelling question was written there.
Granted, I have lived a relatively sheltered life.
I don’t remember being called to the blackboard in high school, but they probably wanted to have as few of us in motion at any one time as was possible. That would have been my play, anyway.
I was not the most academically astute child, but that didn’t mean that I was immune to the allure of The Chalkboard. That thing stretched from one side of the front of the room to the other. That was a huge canvas for any kid to fill and almost every student would have loved to have given it a try–although few wanted to fill it with math equations or sentences using the correct tense of a verb.
The fact that it was usually only the teacher who would write on the board, in her/his perfectly legible printing or writing, added to our interest in giving it a try. This teacher was the centre of our universe for 6 or more hours a day, 5 days a week, and we had studied how they confidently approached the board and wrote sentence after sentence, or times table after times table, VERTICALLY! We were used to writing hunched over a horizontal surface but to just walk up to the wall and write vertically so that the whole class could see, was a horse of an entirely different colour.
First of all, chalk is slipperier than it looks. To take hold of that core of white chalk that was often blunt on the writing tip, felt reminiscent of drawing with those extra big crayons that we hadn’t had to use since kindergarten. It was as if you needed your whole fist to hold it securely.
If that wasn’t enough to distract a called upon student, the pressure that one is to apply when using a writing instrument made entirely of calcium carbonate (derived from either chalk rock or limestone) is something that takes a bit of getting used to. Too little pressure and your drawing control goes out the window, too much and the stick breaks into two or more pieces. An overly firm hand on the chalk stick guaranteed a waterfall of chalk pieces that scurried away from the point of writing and dropped into the ledge along the bottom of the board. Where the Chalkboard Eraser lived.
The chalkboard eraser was probably the best part of the whole chalkboard experience. How many kids intentionally made an error in their answer just so they could use that big eraser to wipe away the mistake and replace it with the answer that was sure to bring accolades from the teacher? Do you remember what a huge deal it was to be picked as the kid who got to stay behind at recess or at the end of the day to erase all of the day’s lessons from the board with one of those big erasers? Also strangely lucky (and hated) was the kid who got to take two of the brushes outside the school and bang them together to ‘clean’ them out a bit. It’s odd to look back and see how petty our lives must have been in order to have these peculiar chores seem like honors! Disconcerting really. Still, there is something very satisfying about cleaning all of the writing off a chalkboard.
That must have been how a cleaner felt after wiping off a chalkboard full of nonsensical science equations at Oxford’s History of Science Museum in 1931. Unfortunately, it was one of three portable chalkboards that had just been used by Albert Einstein who was in town giving a lecture on a cosmological theory he was currently developing, and the chalkboard full of explanatory equations was being donated to the archives of the Museum. Luckily, another of the three chalkboards had already been saved and put away.
That cleaner probably wasn’t picked to bang the brushes together outside the back door of the museum that day.
Going up to the chalkboard in school was magical but also one of those good news/bad news situations. If you were lucky enough to get picked to hustle up to the front to write your answer on it during class, you were also suddenly in full glare of every single student in the room and the teacher, so if you got it wrong…well, it was a widely known error.
Some kids froze up there.
Some wrote so fast in order to get back to the safety of their seats that their writing was almost unreadable.
Some weren’t getting the hang of writing vertically and the backwards slope of their numbers and letters made everyone in class tilt their heads over until their ears were grazing their shoulders, as they tried to decipher what had been written.
There were kids who had friends in the front row who could hiss them the answers in a stage whisper that was audible even out in the hallway.
And some kids were just able to shut out the pressure and get lost in their artistry with the chalk and their calligraphy, and at some point, had to be called back to earth by the teacher while the rest of us snickered. I think they were the lucky ones!
Me? I was rarely on the confident end of the chalk whenever I was sent to the front board to share my answers. The times that I WASN’T picked, I had solid answers that were quite often right, but once my name was called, I usually went blank and stole glances at the answer the kid next to me had written. I still feel flushed when my name is called at Starbucks!
I have absolutely no idea how kids are being taught in school these days but I’m pretty sure that they do not have the same pressures at the blackboard that we all felt as we struggled against our shyness, peer pressure, and the eagerness to prove ourselves. In fact, so many kids these days have allergies, I’ll bet that the parent groups have already had chalk banned from the classroom, and probably insist that their little ones are protected from having to do the teachers’ work of cleaning the boards at the end of the day.
Too bad really.
